Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost 2009

John 6:51, 60-71

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We live in a world made up of people who have become very very good at getting other people to buy stuff. There are some really bad TV commercials out there, but at the same time, I can’t tell you how often I’ve been left almost breathless at the end of an advertisement. I see the incredible beauty of the human body in action, and suddenly I have come to believe and know that I just need get some Gatorade.

And there is a sense in which the Church also wants to become very very good at getting people to buy stuff. We want people to buy into the message of salvation in Christ Jesus. We want people to sell out for the kingdom of God. And we have developed a pretty sophisticated vocabulary for the simple Evangelical ideal of striving to present the gospel in an attractive, compelling way. We talk about “living missionally,” about participating in “incarnational ministry.” We talk about “engaging the culture,” so that we might be able to present the message of Jesus without coming up against unnecessary barriers. We “become all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22) so that it will be as easy as possible for people to accept our invitation to believe in Jesus. And I understand and resonate with so much of this; and I think this way of thinking has a clear theological grounding in the Scriptures and in the tradition of the Church. We strive to portray the incredible beauty of the Christian gospel in action, and we trust that some will come to believe and know that Jesus is the life-giving Holy One of God.

But what on earth are we to do with Jesus himself?! It seems like Jesus wants to preach the gospel in exactly the opposite way that we do: Let’s make this sound as crazy as we can and see what happens from there! Jesus seems to make it as hard as possible for people to accept his invitation to believe in him. In the long discourse leading up to our reading, Jesus has said progressively more and more difficult things for his audience to hear. And the finale looks more like an endorsement of cannibalism than like an attractive Gatorade commercial. “And in conclusion, if you want to live forever, then eat my flesh and drink my blood.” I love the understatement of our English translation: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult.’”

And yet Jesus is definitely extending an invitation to his audience. It may look different from the invitations that we are accustomed to, but this should not prevent us from hearing Jesus preach the gospel. In fact, it is in part the difficulty of Jesus’s form of evangelism that gives expression to the content of his gospel. You see, Jesus doesn’t necessarily want us to understand everything he is saying; he wants us to believe in him, to trust him. St. Augustine, whose feast we are celebrating today, puts it this way: “Jesus did not say, ‘There are some among you who do not understand,’ but he gave the reason for their lack of understanding. ‘There are some among you who do not believe,’ and that is just why they do not understand; because they do not believe.”[1] You see, our mysterious Lord doesn’t necessarily want us to understand everything; he wants us to believe in him, to trust him—to have what we call “faith.”

We are being invited not so much into a tightly-reasoned system of doctrine, but rather into eternal Life himself. Jesus’s gospel is about life. Jesus is about life. Jesus is Life. And of course it’s going to be a mystery how we finite creatures can share in the infinite Life of our creator God. When his disciples complain about how difficult his teaching is, Jesus points to the mystery that is at the heart of his gospel of life.

Jesus says, “If you’re having a hard time believing that I am the bread of life that has come down from heaven, you are going to freak out when you see me ascend back into heaven! You are understanding everything I say as if this earthly reality were the only reality, as if inanimate flesh could actually give life to the world. But you forget that there is more going on here than meets the eye. It is the Spirit that gives life; flesh on its own is useless.” Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus had a very similar conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Jesus asks him, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven” (John 3:12–13). Jesus reminds him that there is more going on than meets the eye. We are not just talking about the kind of life that we are given when we come out of our mothers’ wombs. We are talking about the kind of life that is given to us from above. It is the Spirit that gives this kind of eternal life, and the Spirit is a mysterious thing; like the wind, you cannot see it, and we have no idea how exactly it works; it blows around in mysterious ways.

The eternal life that Jesus offers us is really something that we are simply invited to receive from above. In John 6 Jesus has been talking about receiving the bread that has come down from heaven, and when Jesus tells us that this bread is his flesh, we are right to think that John is writing about the Lord’s Supper. In the Lord’s Supper, we receive the eternal life that is offered to us in the body and blood of Jesus. And again, this is something mysterious, something that has to do with more than just this earthly reality. There is more going on here than meets the eye. But the point is that the life that we are offered in the flesh and blood of Jesus—the life we are offered by his death on the cross and by his presence in the Sacraments—is something that we are simply invited to receive. We consume it. For us the posture of eternal life is one of receptivity, of faith.

In my tradition when it is time to receive the Sacrament, the priest invites us to “feed on Christ in our hearts by faith.” And in John 6, Jesus speaks the same way. Partaking of the bread of life, eating the flesh of Christ, is what it means to believe in him and have eternal life. Evangelicals tend to talk about “asking Christ into your heart,” and this is the same idea: We accept the very life of God by receiving Christ. The Eucharist is a celebration and an embodiment of the entire Christian life. And so St. Augustine can say, “Why are you getting your teeth and stomachs ready? Believe and you have eaten.”[2] And he can remind us that “grace is not something finished off in mouthfuls.”[3] In the Sacrament we celebrate the fact that every minute of every day we are sharing in the eternal life of God by believing, by entrusting ourselves to Jesus’s mysterious invitation to come and abide with him. This is why Jesus can say, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

Jesus has offered us eternal life, and all we have to do is receive it. And yet what we find is that even the reception is something that we receive. As Augustine says, “even believing is something given to us.”[4] Jesus tells his disciples, “No one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” We are not going to feed on Jesus unless we are hungry. And we can’t exactly choose to be hungry. When Jesus says this, many of his disciples turn back and go away. And so Jesus asks the twelve if they too wish to go away. And their response is, “No, master, we do not entirely understand you, but we are still hungry for life. And you are the one who feeds us with words of eternal life, so where else would we go? You are still so very mysterious, but we have come to trust you. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.”

Jesus’s final remark in this conversation with his disciples is a reminder that the question is always before us. Will we be part of the group who stays with Jesus and feeds on him for eternal life, or will we join Judas and go away, and eventually die of starvation? The way Jesus preaches the gospel, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve believed in him for fifty years or whether you came in today not knowing what you believe. In either case, the question is, “Are you hungry for life today?” And if you are hungry, then the Father has already granted everything you need; simply receive the gift. Believe in Jesus. Drink him in. And let eternal life fill you up. Augustine says, “Give me someone who is hungry, give me someone traveling thirsty through this wilderness, and panting for the fountain of life, and [this person] will know what I am saying.”[5] And so our Lord leaves us with the question, “Are you hungry today?” If so, receive the bread of life, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving. Believe in Jesus. Drink him in. And let eternal life fill you up.

Amen.

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[1] Augustine, Homily 27, 7 in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 471.

[2] Augustine, Homily 25, 12 in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 439.

[3] Augustine, Homily 27, 3 in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 467.

[4] Augustine, Homily 27, 7 in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 471.

[5] Augustine, Homily 26, 4 in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 453.

Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost 2009

Psalm 34

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Now, let’s be honest. It can be downright annoying, actually, to have to hear someone going on about how good God always is and about how “happy are those who take refuge in him.” Often it’s annoying because it comes in the form of a shiny-faced preacher telling us how happy we will be as soon as we learn to apply their special happiness wisdom to our lives (wisdom which, conveniently, can be found in a book on the table outside—and for a mere $19.95). And yet isn’t this exactly what the psalmist is telling us this morning?! He says “those who fear the Lord have no want,” they “lack no good thing”; and then he goes on to promise us that he will teach us this happiness-bringing fear of the Lord (wisdom which, conveniently, can be found in two verses in the middle of the psalm—and for free!). We are told that if we desire life and want to enjoy good for many days to come, all we have to do is listen up. I for one am more than a little suspicious…

But, when we look a little closer, it seems that this poet may actually have earned the right to teach us a little something about the goodness of God. For one thing, this is no shiny-faced preacher. In fact we get the impression that he has had his face dragged through the mud a bit. The tradition is that this psalm was written by David when his life was in danger. He was on the run from King Saul and thought he could take refuge in the strength of the nearby Philistine king. But, when the Philistines turned out to be no safer than King Saul, David had to pretend to be insane just to get the Philistine king to send him away. And you would have sent him away too! He started scratching the paint off the doors and he let spit run all down his beard. He was desperate, to say the least.

In any case it’s clear that our psalmist was in a bad way, and so it actually carries some weight when he says, “Look, I know it may not always seem like it, but it is always best for us to trust God. It is always best for us to fear the Lord, to align ourselves with God’s purposes.” I think for me it’s kind of like hearing a recovering alcoholic go on about how good God is and about how “happy are those who take refuge in him.” At first it can sound a bit cheesy, and yet it actually carries a lot of weight when you consider who it’s coming from. I don’t mind getting wisdom for living from people who actually have some life experience. “Look, I know it may not always seem like it, but it is always best for us to trust God. It is always best for us to fear the Lord, to align ourselves with him.”

So, based on some life experience of the seriously not-pleasant variety, this is the most basic wisdom that the psalmist wants to teach us: Trust God. The heart of all the wisdom that the poet has gleaned from his personal encounter with God is, perhaps not surprisingly, the very gospel itself: “Yahweh is a good God; therefore, put all your faith in him.” Trust God. It sounds really simple, doesn’t it? And in a sense it is really simple, as the gospel should be. The Lord is a God who saves those who look to him for salvation. The psalmist wants to teach and re-teach us this simple lesson until we really get it.

But sometimes we don’t really get it. Sometimes we forget that in real life, our God is a savior worth trusting, worth taking refuge in, worth seeking out when we’re in trouble. When I am brutally honest with myself, I know that God is not often enough the first place I turn when I’m in need of a savior…

I remember in my freshman year of college being crammed into the backseat of a very small car with four of my closest friends as we made our way from Pittsburgh to New York City in order to see a Radiohead concert. We’re all having a great time, listening to loud music and the whole deal. Driving way too fast, we suddenly plowed through a huge amount of debris scattered in the middle of the road, and that was the end of it. The car immediately went into an uncontrollable spin and we skidded from the far left lane all the way across the highway and slammed hard into the guardrail on the far right. The car was beyond totaled. And as we all got out and made sure that everyone was okay, which somehow we all were, I remember looking out over the guardrail and seeing the tremendous cliff  that we were had been kept from tumbling over. And I remember knowing without any exaggeration at all that we easily could have died. But here’s what I remember most clearly about the accident: In the split second, as we were spinning out of control across the highway, the girl sitting next to me screamed at the top of her lungs, “Jesus!” Now, if you knew my friend, then you would know that in this context the name of our Lord was to be understood as an expletive, not quite a prayer. And yet, it was actually just the right expletive, wasn’t it? It’s even more profound when we remember that the name which my friend managed to utter itself means “Yahweh saves!” Whether she knew it or not, my friend was proclaiming the gospel and crying out to the only One who can be trusted to save our lives. I on the other hand was dumbfounded. Silently fearing for my own life, I lacked the faith even just to whisper the name of the One who saves… And yet, with or without my trust, Yahweh did save my life that day. The psalmist says, “Trust God. He has, after all, proven himself trust-worthy.”

Trusting God means crying out for him and knowing that he is the one to look to for real-life salvation. And it’s easy enough for us to forget that. But, it’s at this point that the psalmist goes on to make an interesting connection. You see, according to the poet’s wisdom, to trust God as the life-giver also means to trust that God’s way of life is the most life-giving way to live. Let me say that again. Trusting God to be the life-giver means trusting that God’s way of life is the most life-giving way to live. So the psalmist asks us, “Which of you desires life!?” And while everybody’s hand is still in the air, he says, “Okay, then entrust yourself to God’s way of life. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.”

This is what our poet calls “the fear of the Lord.” The fear of the Lord is a matter of trusting God enough to live life God’s way. Trusting God means believing him when he says things to us like, “Look, my children, it’s going to be most life-giving for you to keep your tongues from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” The Lord has proven himself trust-worthy; and if we can trust God to save our lives, then we can also trust God to teach us how best to live our lives. The psalmist says that if we learn this kind of trust, then we have learned the fear of the Lord. “Look, I know it may not always seem like it, but it is always best for us to trust God. It is always best for us to fear the Lord, to align ourselves with God’s purposes.”

But here’s the thing. The truth is, sometimes trusting God gets you killed. Sometimes it seems that the psalmist was wrong after all. Sometimes the Lord does not keep all our bones from being broken. Sometimes trusting God gets us killed. …

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These three young men always remind me why the martyrs of the Church are our most highly venerated saints. It’s because they show us the very essence of a life entirely entrusted to God. When Nebuchadnezzar tries violently to coerce the three young Jews to renounce their trust in Yahweh by worshipping the idol of a false god, they have this to say to the king of Babylon: “Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3:16–18 [niv]). They know full well that sometimes trusting God gets you killed. And yet they still find Yahweh to be trust-worthy, and so they trust him. They trust that somehow even if they were to taste death, it still would not prevent Psalm 34 from being true: “The Lord redeems the life of his servants.”

And, of course, as Christians, we know of another young Jew whose trust in God did eventually get him killed. Our Lord did taste death; and yet his perfect trust in God was vindicated anyway. God raised him from the dead. And so he is ultimately the perfect witness to the trustworthiness of our God. “Yahweh saves.” “Jesus.” Jesus, the voice of God wrapped in flesh sings along with the poet of Psalm 34: I know it may not always seem like it, but it is always best for us to trust God. It is always best for us to fear the Lord, to align ourselves with him.

Can you taste it and see it? The Lord is so good! It only makes sense for us to end where Psalm 34 begins, to end by praising God. In the Apocrypha there are additions to the book of Daniel. And one of these additions is a beautiful hymn of praise placed in the mouths of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. As they walked around in King Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, in the midst of the flames, they sang this prayer to the God whom they had learned to trust:

Glory to you, Lord God of our fathers; *
you are worthy of praise; glory to you.
Glory to you for the radiance of you holy Name; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.

Glory to you in the splendor of you temple; *
on the throne of your majesty, glory to you.
Glory to you, seated between the Cherubim; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.

Glory to you, beholding the depths; *
in the high vault of heaven, glory to you.
Glory to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.[1]

Amen.

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[1] Canticle 13 at Morning Prayer, The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 90.

beginning again…

So… it’s certainly been way too long, but I have decided to go ahead and post several sermons and papers that I have written since my last post. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, reactions, prayers, questions….

(Each sermon, reflection, or paper is posted according to its original composition date.)

Fifth Sunday of Easter 2009

Deuteronomy 4:32-40

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Do you remember who God is? Or, more to the point, Do you remember who it is that reigns as God over all? This is the question posed to the Israelites who have set up camp on the east side of the River Jordan. We are joining them today in the valley at the base of Mount Nebo, the mountain from which one can see the whole land of Canaan. We are at the threshold of the Promised Land.

After forty years of shepherding the Israelites as they wandered together in the desert, the elderly Moses is now preaching his final sermon series before handing over the mantle of leadership to Joshua, the young commander who will guide the people across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land. The book of Deuteronomy is presented to us as a later recounting of these final sermons of Moses.

Unfortunately, today we’re strolling into church late; we’ve already missed the majority of Moses’ sermon. So far this afternoon, our preacher has been working up a good sweat thumping the pulpit about our responsibilities as God’s distinctive people. He’s also been fervently proclaiming the good news about God’s mercy and faithfulness. … Right now, just as we are walking in, Moses is taking a deep breath. He wipes the sweat from his forehead; and, with a flash of life in his keen old eyes, he concludes his sermon with these deliberate words from Deuteronomy 4, beginning at verse 32.

³²“Ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? ³³Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? ³⁴Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? ³⁵To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him. ³⁶From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire. ³⁷And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, ³⁸driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession, as it is still today. ³⁹So acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. ⁴⁰Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time.” [NRSV]

Do you remember who God is? Or, more to the point, Do you remember who it is that reigns as God over all?

Moses is preaching to us, even if our situation is rather different from that of the Israelites. It is true that as Christians we have not been promised the land of Canaan. And our obedience to God’s law sometimes takes a different form from that of the Jewish statutes in Deuteronomy because our faith finds its root in the Gentile mission of the Apostles after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Nevertheless, through our faith in Christ Jesus, God has now adopted us into that same family of people who heard Moses preaching at the foot of Mount Nebo. And so we rightly hear these words as addressed to us. As the people of God, we share a long history, and, indeed, it is this history that Moses is preaching about.

In the Burning Bush, in the Exodus from Egypt, in the entry into the Promised Land, we have a history with God. And Moses says that because of this history as God’s people, we ought to know who God is, we ought to know that the Lord is God.

But it seems to me that far too often we forget who is God. We forget who it was that spoke in the fire. We forget who it was that brought us out of Egypt, who provided for us. Sometimes we get to thinking that the U.S. government is the god who provides for those in need. Sometimes we address our prayers to the invisible hand of the market economy, hoping that the deity will not require any sacrifice from us today. … I even have heard that some of us are tempted to worship the director J. J. Abrams as the god who brings us the T.V. show LOST, not to mention this week’s blockbuster, Star Trek! Sometimes it seems we have no idea who is God…

But through history God has shown us who he is. In fact, in history God even tells us his name! Moses says that our history should lead us to acknowledge that “the Lord is God.” But the Hebrew word that gets translated here as “the Lord” is not a title but a name. It is the name for God that we are given in history by the voice in the Burning Bush, a name that in Hebrew sounds something like “Yahweh.” Here in Deuteronomy, Moses is reminding us that our history as God’s people shows us that “the Lord is God,” “Yahweh is God; there is no other.” Yahweh is the God who redeems the oppressed from their slavery; and Yahweh is the God who provides for the life of his people.

Since we know who God is from our history as his people, we have the ability to recognize when God is acting in history today. For instance, there is a movement to combat sexual slavery in many places of the world today, and because we know from our history that Yahweh is the God who liberates from bondage, we know that this is his movement today. We can look at the events of history and say, this is Yahweh at work striving to free these women from the oppressive traffic of sexual slavery.

You see, our history with God stretches right up to this moment. Even here. Now. In this double-wide trailer slash homiletics classroom slash sometimes house of worship. How did we get here anyway? What history do you have with Yahweh that shows you that he is God? … We all have unique stories, don’t we? And as God’s people we need to tell and re-tell our history—from “the day that God created human beings on the earth,” to day of the Burning Bush, right up to the present day—this is how we remember who is God. This is how we remember Yahweh is God. Because of our history as the people of God, we know who God is.

Somebody yells from the back of the church, “Okay, Moses, so we’ve established that our history reveals that Yahweh is God. So what?” The Reverend Moses’ answer: “So keep his statutes and his commandments.” Now, even though as Gentiles we do not follow all of the Jewish statutes spelled out in Deuteronomy, still, as Christians we know that we are called to obey Yahweh’s commandments as they are made known to us in the Bible as a whole.

Don’t miss how surprisingly good this news is! The picture that the book of Deuteronomy paints is this: The statutes and commandments of God are good news for us because they show us who we are!

Because Yahweh has given us his statutes and commandments and said, “This is who you are to be,” now we know who we are as a people. Yahweh has given us an identity! We are a people who remain faithful to our spouses. We are truth-tellers. We are those who do not covet the world’s riches. We are Yahweh’s people. Because we know who God is, now we know who we are!

I can imagine one of the girls in the youth group that I pastor asking the question, “Who am I?” For her, the future is an uncertain thing. She doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. She wonders whether she’s hott or not. And the T.V. commercials haven’t even been able to help her figure out whether she’s a Mac or a PC, let alone answer the deeper question, “Who am I?”! In the eyes of the world, this young girl might have what we call an identity crisis. And yet, I think she knows who she is. In the cafeteria at school she, like God, is a friend to the friendless. She has been a champion of the needy, enthusiastically raising hundreds of dollars for the alleviation of world hunger because she knows that this is God’s work in history. She is a faithfully devoted member of the family of God, especially honoring her own mother, even when it’s not Mother’s Day! Our culture has been wasting billions of dollars trying to convince this young girl to find her identity in a product, or a style, or a logo. Meanwhile, she has been reminding all of us that Yahweh is a God who holds out his hands to offer us a way of life as his people, to offer us an identity. Yeah, she knows who she is.

It is no secret that for us in this room, the future is an uncertain thing. And yet, the good news is that we know who we are. And we know who we are to be. Our history with Yahweh has completely joined our identity to his. We are Yahweh’s people. And we have been given the gift of his commandments, the gift of a way of life. We have been given an identity. And this is tremendously good news … regardless of whether you’re a Mac or a PC!

Perhaps the most central of the statutes and commandments that we are given in Deuteronomy is the command to worship Yahweh alone. “Hear O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one.” Or, as it is stated in our passage, “Take to heart that Yahweh is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.” The most central commandment is to remember who is God. Which means that at the center of the distinctive identity that Yahweh has given us as his people—at the center of our identity—lies the call to remember who God is. And this brings us back full-circle to where we began, with the Israelites at the threshold of the Promised Land. …

Do you remember who God is? Or, more to the point, Do you remember who it is that reigns as God over all? When we look to our history, and remember who our God is, then we will remember who we are, and who we are to be as his people.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Third Sunday of Easter 2009

Acts 4:1-12

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We’re pretty good at observing Lent. For forty days we pray and fast and concentrate our energies on self-examination, which at times can border on self-flagellation, all for the sake of obeying the call to repentance that we hear on Ash Wednesday. This leads up to Good Friday, and finally to Easter. We go all-out and celebrate Easter with great enthusiasm, shouting “Alleluia” and “He is risen.” But then what? It was good to have spent such a long Lenten season of preparation for our Lord’s passion and resurrection, but we often don’t realize that while Lent is forty days of preparation, the season of Easter is fifty days of celebration! The Great Fifty Days that lead from Easter to Pentecost ought to be every bit as joyful and celebratory as Lent was sorrowful and contrite.

The way Luke tells the story in the book of Acts, Peter and John understand the season of Easter, even though at this point they are already past the day of Pentecost. They are still aglow with the magnitude of what happened on Easter morning. They gratuitously heal people; and they just can’t keep from preaching the resurrection!

It’s weird. Peter and John heal a cripple, and then get themselves thrown into prison for preaching about the resurrection, and then they get interrogated the next day not about their preaching but about the healing! Somehow, for St. Luke the storyteller, bodily healing and the resurrection of the dead in Jesus have everything to do with each other.

Peter is asked about how he healed the cripple and he makes sure to let his interrogators know: “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed.” We conservatives tend to make a big deal out of the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning, but do we get why that’s so important? Peter got it. The healing of a cripple—or, maybe closer to home for many of us, the healing of those in our midst who do battle with cancer—these healings are foretastes of the resurrection of the dead in Jesus. Easter is the first fruit of God’s new creation. Easter means that God is now making a new creation, which means salvation from sin, yes, but also salvation from crippling birth defects and from cancer and from all of the unhealth that we live with every day.

A while back a parishioner—and I honestly forget who it was now—approached me after worship one Sunday and asked, “What is the Anglican definition of salvation.” Now, I was relatively distracted that particular Sunday morning, and we Anglicans really aren’t too interested in defining things that precisely anyway—which I think is a good thing—and so I told this parishioner that as far as I knew there was no single official Anglican definition of salvation; Anglicans believe that salvation is whatever the Bible says salvation is. The parishioner got a worried look on her face and expressed some concern over someone else’s definition of salvation as “wholeness” or “healing” (or some such liberal-sounding word). And when I said that “healing” sounded like a pretty good description of salvation to me, the Evangelical in her interjected immediately, “But what about salvation from sin!? What about the Atonement? What about the cross?” I told her that I understood redemption from sin to be part of God’s holistic act of healing us from all our unhealth, and that this is what we call “salvation.” … I am not sure that my answer satisfied that parishioner’s curiosity, and I hope that it did not. It is good to be curious about these things and to go on questioning. And I love that this is the kind of ongoing family conversation that makes up daily life in the Church.

The book of Acts is also part of the Church’s conversation about the meaning of salvation. You see, in verses 9–12 of our passage, Luke uses the very same word for “healing” that he uses for “salvation.” The verses could easily be translated from the Greek like this: “Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: ‘Rulers and elders of the people! If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was saved, then know this you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you saved.” And then Peter goes on, “Healing is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be healed.” Peter is saying that the resurrection of Jesus releases into our world a power unlike any other—a power to heal and to save!

Because of what God did on Easter morning, all the healing, saving power at work in the world is forever tied to the name of Jesus. Let me say that again: Because of what God did on Easter morning, all the healing, saving power at work in the world is forever tied to the name of Jesus. This is what it means to say that “there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Mysteriously, we Christians believe that wherever there is salvation and healing happening in the world, it is happening by the power of the resurrected Jesus. I would even go so far as to say that whenever we encounter beauty or art working in a redemptive way, this is the power of the Resurrection at work. Music that speaks to your heart in a time of great pain. A painting that reminds us that the world is not all ugly. These signs of salvation and healing are tied to the name of Jesus. This is what it means to say that “salvation, healing, is found in no one else.”

We believe that God’s new creation began on Easter morning, and so wherever we see any sign of that new creation at work, we must think of the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Verse 14 of our chapter in Acts tells us that because Peter and John’s interrogators “could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say”! A new creation was breaking into their world, and it had everything to do with the name of Jesus.

“Salvation is found in no one else…” One of the most interesting things that this means for us is that each time we see something beautiful, each time we see some hint of salvation or healing, we are called to join with Peter in his apostolic testimony: “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who was crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this new creation now stands before you.”

Are we bold enough to join our voices to Peter’s? If all salvation, all healing, is forever tied to the name of Jesus because of the power of the Resurrection, then we can boldly attribute to the name of Jesus each and every act of healing performed in our hospitals. For the creative, artistic sisters and brothers of this parish, Are we courageous enough to declare in utter sincerity that somehow, mysteriously, it is by the power of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that we make redemptive art, whether in the form of music or film or dance or finger-paint? Must we not say what Peter and John will say in v. 20? “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” The healing, saving power of the Resurrection at work in the world since the first Easter, especially through the ministry of the Church—this power is forever tied to the name of Jesus.

We began by seeing in this story from the Acts of the Apostles how the Resurrection releases salvation into our world, and how this salvation is a holistic act of God—it involves both body and soul, healing from disease and salvation from sin. Then we were reminded by St. Peter that this saving, healing power of the resurrection is forever tied to the name of Jesus, because it was this Jesus whom God resurrected from the dead on Easter morning. So, where does all this put us? What character do we play in Luke’s story?

Well, our calling is the same as that of St. Peter and St. John: to share with Christ in his healing ministry, to allow the saving presence of God to be at work in the world through our mediation, and then to proclaim that it is by the name of the resurrected Jesus that any healing occurs. We are all called to participate in Christ’s healing ministry in different ways: Some of us actually heal bodies and minds as medical professionals or psychologists or psychiatrists; Some of us make movies that have a healing effect on the minds and hearts of audiences; Some of us are called to persistent prayer that God would heal specific people directly by the power of his Spirit. When any such healing occurs, we are called to point to the name of Jesus.

You see, healing, salvation, is something that God does through the Church acting in the name of Jesus Christ. Which is an incredible, awe-inspiring, humbling thing to say: Salvation is something that God does through the Church acting in the power, in the name, of Jesus Christ. For heaven’s sake, let us be bold about this calling! It is the very same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead that is now at work in us!

The funny thing about this incredible resurrection power is that it works itself out in the most ordinary of daily-life situations. It happens when you are on your way to church and that same guy who is always sitting at the corner asks you yet again if you can spare some change (at least that’s how it happened for St. Peter). It happens when a family member is healed through the prayers of the people of the Church. It happens when someone at the top of the company takes a pay cut so that someone at the bottom can keep their job and earn enough to live. The healing power of the resurrection works itself out in the ordinary. That’s why the verse immediately after where we stopped reading this morning says, “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.”

Ordinary men and women: that’s us, that’s the Church. And yet, for heaven’s sake, let us be bold about our ordinary calling to heal and to proclaim the resurrection! It is, after all, the very same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead that is now at work in us!

Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom God raised from the dead, is creation’s only hope. And it is this beautiful gospel of life that we continue joyfully to celebrate throughout the season of Easter.

Amen.